Category: Articles

The installation below is titled: To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, 1999, 2008, by Michael Nelson. Nelson is a contemporary British installation artist who was nominated twice for the Turner Prize. Born in Loughborough in 1967, lives and works in London.

I appreciate art, but sometimes I just don’t ‘get’ a piece of artwork or an installation.

Recently I visited the Miami Art Musuem for the first time and while it was an interesting hour plunged into contemporary art works, I found one installation quite puzzling. It was Carlos Bunga: Metamorphosis which featured two large-scale, site-specific structures created from perishable materials (cardboard), and supposesdly explores the continuous mutation of architecture and urban space.

To me and my fellow viewers (two friends) it was simply painted cardboard. Funny thing, my friend walked into the room and said “Oh there’s nothing here”, and proceeded to walk out when I called out – ‘No, this is one of the exhibits”. She thought they were working on the room, as if it were under construction. That was the highlight of that exhibit.

As hard as I tried to appreciate the work, it evoked nothing from me. I was staring at purple, green, and orange painted cardboard. The thing I did appreciate was the fact that someone would even think of putting together pieces of cardboard as Carlos Bunga had. The blurb on the wall explaining the installation went into such grand detail about structure and space and urban shifts and so on and forth. But it made no difference…I understood none of that vision.

Why am I saying all this…because this installation by Mike Nelson, like Carlos Bunga’s, is a grand example of art I do not understand. All I see is destroyed walls. Maybe my artistic intelligence isn’t as grand as those who would understand it. Who knows.

We say we’re not like them. Murderers, killers, assassins, those folk who reside in 2×4 cells on the edge of the grey wall oblivion, staring through steel bars, wishing they could fit through and step back into the real world. But they don’t fit in do they? We do. The common man, the upright citizen, the ordinary admirable human being.

Don’t be naïve. We’re all murderers. We kill. We just don’t think of it that way when we do it. We might use the words as we commit the act by saying things like “Kill it!” but there is no blood, no horror, and no mess.

People kill everyday. Blindly and sometimes with certainty. I killed something the other day. It was my fault. Its death was by my bare hands and bare feet, or lack of using them. I killed my plant. It wasn’t the first. Everyday I watched it die a slow agonizing death. My backyard was suppose to be its haven, instead I made it its death row cell and it was dead plant walking. All I had to do was go over the sink fill up a container of water (our elixir of life) and walk back to my poor plant and pour. Finally I intervened like a governor according a pardon. Time will tell if it comes back from the dead. I wonder if my plant saw the light at the end of the tunnel and cursed my name into the heavens, as it lay wanton and listless begging to be fed. Did it warn my other thriving foliage in my backyard to my serial killer tendencies? Don’t laugh, plants have abilities to communicate, how is still a wonder, but they definitely do and not just to their fellow seedlings, they network with insects too, which leads me to another murderous fact.

People kill bugs every day. Sometimes they murder them, with a steel tipped boot or with a soft scented tissue or florally designed paper towel, crunching beneath them all. It is curious how Homo sapiens so large and strapping next to a measly bug could find its insectile enemy so threatening. Kind of reminds me of David and Goliath or how countries view one another in their race to rule the world. Don’t we already know that cockroaches will win that war? Just like with terrorists, you kill one and one is already back in place before the body is cold. Bugs Are Terrorists. Imagine that headline in a newspaper.

Speaking of media, news outlets and their pundits kill news stories in hopes of having the world ignorant in its bliss. News is killed to keep the populace safe and germ free in their little bubble of a life. For the germ of the truth might spread like a disease and riddle the world with distrust and hatred and we don’t want that. We’re mad enough as it is. Just ask Edgar Allen Poe who once quoted this lofty piece “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”

Ahhh such diction that quote emanates. Vocabulary was once something poetic, triumphant and glorious. Most of us, hopefully, but not quite accurately, have completed those arduous twelve years of schooling. However, we kill the English language everyday by using acronyms and shortened versions of words to express ourselves in the ever-expanding technological coliseum of expression. Words fight to the death to remain alive to see another day and the outcome is bleak for prose that isn’t ‘hip’. LOL is a synonym for Losing Our Language. Everyone should be on death row for this abhorrent betrayal of his or her tongue. Why must proper usage fall to the waste side and die in order for us to be modernly loquacious and articulate? Society is tolerating the lower expectations and killing English as we know it in the process.

Is this kind? No. But we are a selfish lot. We use deceit and lies to get what we want. We sometimes do this by killing with kindness. We put on our sweet smiling faces and becomes frenemies with our enemies and bite our tongues when it really should be wagged, all for the sake of escalating ourselves higher in society or for simply wanting someone to like us, so we’re not alone in our little bubble anymore. Alas that is the human condition and unfortunately is not something we can change.

How can we change when we won’t even change the way we treat ourselves, never mind someone else. We kill ourselves, everyday, slowly, with opiates, prescription meds, alcohol, and fatty fast foods. All designed to make us feel better. Do you feel any better? Why do we asphyxiate ourselves in our sorrows and insecurities and see negativity clearer than the positive? Why not let the light shine brighter on happiness?

From one fellow executioner to another, if you find yourself wearing that hood and standing next to the guillotine, why don’t you take it off, breathe a little and step aside. Something to think about the next time you inadvertently drop that blade. Oh and don’t shoot (and kill) the messenger. Thank you.